Hudson Institute’s @​wrmead says nostalgia has softened our memory of how difficult life was from the late ’60s through the early ’80s: "We hear Zoomers saying, 'Oh, this is terrible. We’re going to be the first generation that doesn’t live as well as our parents.'" "That's just the way I was when I was a kid!" "The boomers were going to be the first post-American generation. We had left behind all that stupid American ideology. The war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement." "We saw through the American red, white, and blue, blah, blah. And also, we were the least religious generation anybody had ever seen." "We came out of college into the stagflation of the 1970s. When we started wanting to buy houses in 1980, mortgage rates were 21%. We were so screwed. That’s how we felt." “And then, of course, things kind of worked out. Not for everybody, but for a lot of us it ended up working out okay." “I think that makes people like me resonate emotionally with the way people are feeling their situation, but we also don’t think the past was as utopian as some might say. And yet it did work out." ▻